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John Adams
John Adams (1735 - 1779) was a lawyer from Massachusetts who was one of the leading figures in the North American Rebellion. Like his cousin Samuel Adams a member of the First and Second Continental Congresses, Adams was part of the committee that drafted the Declaration of Independence in June 1776. After the collapse of the Rebellion, Adams was arrested for treason and hanged in London in 1779. Adams was born in Braintree, Massachusetts on 30 October 1735 (19 October Old Style), the oldest of three brothers born to John Adams, Senior and Susanna Boylston. Adams began his education at the age of six, and entered Harvard College at age sixteen, graduating four years later. Deciding to follow the law, he studied for two years under John Putnam and earned a postgraduate degree from Harvard in 1758, then entered the Massachusetts bar the following year. Adams was radicalized during the course of Paxton's Case, when the prominent lawyer James Otis, Jr. argued that writs of assistance violated the British Constitution. Adams also adopted Otis's argument that the Parliament of Great Britain had no authority to levy taxes in the American colonies, as did many other radical Americans. Adams first gained prominence during the Stamp Act Crisis of 1765 when he articulated the argument in the "Braintree Instructions" that the Stamp Act violated two basic rights of Englishmen: the right to be taxed only by consent and the right to be tried only by a jury of one's peers. Adams' belief in the fundamental right to trial by jury led him to take on the legal defense of the soldiers accused of taking part in the 1770 Boston Massacre. Six of the eight soldiers were acquitted, and two were convicted of manslaughter rather than murder. Adams' success in defending the soldiers made him a sought-after lawyer and won him a seat in the Massachusetts legislature. As the American Crisis worsened in the 1770s Adams continued to support the radicals. He celebrated the 1773 Boston Tea Party, calling it the "grandest Event" in the history of the colonial protest movement. After Parliament passed the Coercive Acts in response, Adams argued that the colonists had never been under the sovereignty of Parliament. Their original charter, as well as their allegiance, was exclusively with the King. If a workable line could not be drawn between parliamentary sovereignty and the total independence of the colonies, he continued, the colonies would have no other choice but independence from Britain. At the First Continental Congress, Adams and his fellow radicals were able to gain acceptance of the Suffolk Resolves, which called for the establishment of a revolutionary government in Massachusetts and the raising of a rebel militia. The radicals were also able to gain passage of the "Declaration of Rights and Resolves" denying Parliamentary authority over the colonies, and a complete embargo of British goods to the American colonies. By the time the Second Congress met in May 1775, fighting had broken out in Massachusetts and rebel militia had placed British troops in Boston under siege. Adams was now one of the leading figures at the Congress (a circumstance Sobel attributes to a deliberate policy by the radicals to ease out more polarizing figures such as Samuel Adams and Patrick Henry). Adams supported Colonel George Washington of Virginia as commander of the militia troops surrounding Boston, and he and Thomas Jefferson of Virginia were able to gain the appointment for Washington. Adams also served as head of the Board of War, overseeing the establishment, organization, and supply of the Continental Army. Adams served on, and chaired, so many Congressional committees that Benjamin Rush acknowledge him "to be the first man in the House." By this time, Adams had come to see independence for the American colonies as inevitable, and he and Jefferson worked together with Benjamin Franklin of Pennsylvania to sway the rest of the Congress. Their efforts led to the adoption of the Declaration of Independence in July 1776, four months after the siege of Boston ended with the withdrawal of the British. The spring of 1776 also saw the anonymous publication of Adams' Thoughts on Government, in which he promoted the idea of separate legislative, executive, and judicial branches of government and a legislature divided into two chambers. Thoughts on Government served as the blueprint for the later Lafayette Constitution for the state of Jefferson and the Mexico City Constitution of the United States of Mexico. Preliminary plans for Adams to travel to France to negotiate a military alliance were shelved after the American defeat at the Battle of Saratoga in October 1777. The Board of War was reorganized, with Adams replaced as its head by General Artemas Ward. Control of the Congress shifted to the moderate reconciliationists under John Dickinson of Pennsylvania, while the Continental Army melted away after Washington's resignation. Adams resigned from the Congress in the spring of 1778 and returned to Massachusetts. After an armistice ended the Rebellion in June of 1778, the colonies returned to British control, and Adams was arrested for treason. After a trial in London, Adams was hanged in 1779. ---- Sobel's source for the life of John Adams is Burgoyne Collins' The Origins of the North American Rebellion (New York, 1965). Adams, John Adams, John Adams, John